Four weeks later, Marnie Arbinger, a renowned hematologist from the CDC arrived like the answer to a prayer. She appeared with a thoroughly chastened bush pilot who was known for giving female medics and doctors alike problems, and Stephanie had to admit that she was impressed.
Still, though, it was hard to really take the girl seriously. She was young and blond, delicately beautiful in a way that Stephanie had never been. She knew that there was no such thing as a beauty contest when lives were at stake. She left Marnie to start her work with Jessica since the two were friends, and it was Jessica's pull that had brought Marnie out to Tanzania.
Dr. Arbinger provided some much needed aid, but it was really a scant comfort to Stephanie. That afternoon, Stephanie found herself angrier with the idea of the new doctor than anything else, and her anger brought her a dead stop.
“What the hell is wrong with me?” she wondered. Her hands paused as she rifled through the paperwork that was part and parcel of running any organization of this size. She was, for once, mercifully alone in the trailer that served as her administrative center, and she could pause to think about what was going on with herself.
God, I've been terrible lately, she thought with a little regret. She had been snappish with her staff, and though some of it could be attributed to the strain of the disease they were fighting, not all of it was. She thought of how tired she had been, and how very sore. Her glance dropped to the paperwork, which contained today's date, and her eyes widened.
“No... no, there's no way...” she said out loud.
They were not set up as a women's health center, but they had many of the tools that one might need. Somehow, Stephanie smuggled a pregnancy kit into the communal toilets, and in less than five minutes, she had her answer.
“Oh, dear lord...” she murmured, looking at the double line.
She was pregnant. Somehow, despite her birth control, she was pregnant, and the world dipped around her. The scientific part of her brain told her that it was an absolute possibility after what had passed between her and Noah, but the rest of her simply reeled. When she managed to find her footing again mentally, one thought stood out from the rest.
I am going to have a baby.
She locked herself in the administrative trailer, stunned and trying to process her emotions. The first feeling that surfaced was fear. She knew how vulnerable pregnant woman could be to disease, and right now, she was surrounded by one of the worst epidemics she had ever seen. They were losing more people to the strange sickness every day, and almost subconsciously, her hands spread over her flat stomach. She glanced down at it in dismay.
It was hard to believe that there was a life inside her, something that her body would fight to nurture and to protect. Still, it was there, and she felt a fierce surge of maternal affection. She was going to be a mother.
Of course, the question was what she would be a mother to. For the first time, she thought of Noah's transformation with a shiver. He had talked about his kind living among humans for thousands of years, but did they breed true? Would her child be completely human, or would it have Noah's powers? Would a child be able to perform the transformation that Noah had, or would it be stuck? Stephanie's breath caught at the idea of her child being born a mix of baby and cub, something stuck between forms, suffering and dying, and she being unable to help it.
She could feel a panic start to set in, but Stephanie took a deep breath and refused to allow it to consume her. She was running a camp that was doing its best to save people against all the odds. She had come to Tanzania to battle the specter of disease. She would not give in so easily to unfounded fears.
She told herself that she was a doctor. She could monitor the pregnancy carefully, and she had at least eight months to figure everything out. With one hand cradled over her belly, she thought about what needed to happen.
One thought came through loud and clear. She needed to find Noah. He needed to be told.
*
Two days later, everything kicked into high gear. First, two men entered the camp. One of them was Marcus, though he seemed to have his hands too full with Dr. Delaney to greet her. He had some kind of love affair going with Jessica, though neither of them seemed very happy about it. It occurred to Stephanie that he, then, was the lover that she had been hiding. The second man...
Stephanie learned much later that he was named Jax, and he was ripped to ribbons. She was certain when Dr. Arbinger took him to the operating room that her efforts would be wasted and he would die, but somehow, somehow, he was up and moving around less than twelve hours later, albeit gingerly.
Something about the man reminded her of Noah, and it occurred to her that rapid healing was certainly something that could be a shifter trait. At the moment, Jax seemed glued to Marnie, and so Stephanie let it go for the time being.
It was around that time when the illness, already fast and deadly, seemed to kick into high gear. Suddenly, the time between contraction and death shortened, and the panic was rising both in the medical camp and in the village. It meant that Stephanie had to impose the iron ruling that she had been resisting for some time.
“Complete quarantine,” she told her stone-faced staff. “No one in, no one out.”
Her staff were skilled and they worked tirelessly to convey her orders to the village and to provide comfort and aid where they could. At this point, however, there was perishingly little they could do. There was nothing that could be done against the disease's fast spread, and Stephanie began to wonder if she was going to die here. If they were all going to die here.
At the height of the illness, when Stephanie hadn't slept in almost thirty hours, Jax came to her. It struck her in a dull sort of way that he was surprisingly handsome, even as she realized that it was only a slight resemblance to Noah that made him seem so.
“What I'm going to tell you will shock you,” he began, and she lanced him with a sharp gaze.
“You’re a shifter?” she asked, and she had the satisfaction of watching him rear back in surprise.
“Yes,” he said after a moment. “You... how do you...”
“I know what Marcus is, and I know Noah as well. I was wondering if you were the same.”
“I am,” he said, “but, listen. There is going to be an attack. There is a troupe of hyena shifters coming here soon...”
She listened with increasing shock as he described the attack that was imminent. The idea of two men fending off an attack of that size seemed ludicrous, but Jax appeared confident enough. She supposed that if a man who had been on death's door the night before was confident about such a thing, she would have to trust him.
“All right, then. I'll bring my people back as far from the plain as possible. Then, I'll come back. I know my way around a rifle well enough.”
Jax looked startled at her steely gaze.
“You can't be serious, you're a healer...”
“When people try to hurt those I am healing, I turn into something else,” she responded shortly. “Now tell me if we can find Noah. I can't imagine that he would shy away from this fight.”
Jax shook his head firmly.
“He is following another lead. The council set him on a trail to the south, and he's been out of contact for some time. I have a way that may work in getting through to him, but that's something for emergencies only.”
Would it make a difference if you knew that I was carrying his child? Stephanie wondered, but she pushed the thought away.
“All right,” she said instead.
After that, Stephanie was consumed with the terrifying task of trying to move both healthy and sick as far into the rear of the settlement as possible. The people were afraid and shocked, but with some prodding and some shouting, she got them where they needed to be. Once she had gotten them stationed, she went to find her own rifle.
The last thing she wanted was to be a target, so looking around, she decided on an aerial perch. This was going to be a battle of blood and fang, she knew, and that meant that she would have to worry far less about being a target above.
With a grunt, she climbed on top of one of the trailers.
They looked like normal hyenas. That was one of the first things she noticed. The hyena was an animal she had become quite familiar with in her sojourns throughout Africa. She had always thought they were fearsome animals, but she respected their tenacity and their will to survive. For a moment, she had a twinge about the idea of shooting them. That was something that poachers did...
Then Stephanie narrowed her eyes and really saw the way they moved. They didn't travel in a rambling pack, playing and herding what cubs there were. Instead, they moved in a wedge-shaped formation, moving quickly and with a sense of purpose that she could only call military. It was shocking to see, and in that moment, she realized beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was no way these animals were truly animals. There was a real human intelligence behind the animal bodies.
However, a part of her still doubted that until, some twenty yards from the camp proper, they started a dead run. It was a hunting behavior, she knew, one that they executed when there was prey in sight. There was no doubt about it now, they were attacking, and Stephanie gritted her teeth.
One last shot, she thought.
She fired the rifle over their heads, a loud report that seemed to shake the world apart. The hyenas shied away, but as she suspected they would do, they swarmed back into place, never wavering from their attack.
Stephanie felt her mind clear. She wasn't a killer; she was, first and foremost, a healer, and there were people in her care. She needed to make sure that the people she was protecting were safe, and these hyenas represented a clear and present danger to them.
It had been a while since she had shot. Her first few missed, but then her third shot took one attacking hyena down just as it was about to clamp jaws on the hind foot of the tiger that had thrown itself into the mix. The hyena fell back into the grass, and turned into a man at the moment of death. Stephanie registered the transformation as well as the tiger's startled look in her direction, but she was already sighting another shot, taking aim, pulling the trigger.
She fell into a rhythm, pausing only to reload. Her motions were unhurried because she had been taught that it was far better to be slow than clumsy. She was in a clear and silent place where everything had its own time. Her mind drifted once or twice to the baby that slept inside her, to the lion man whose presence she desperately longed for, but otherwise, it was perfectly quiet inside her head.
The entire battle likely took less than an hour, but it was strange to Stephanie. After a short while, it felt as if she had done nothing but lie on top of the trailer, shooting the things that had come to hurt her patients. In her memory, however, it felt as if it was all over in a mere minute.
She was still in that haze when a terrible thumping shook the entire trailer. Stephanie cried out, clinging instinctively to the trailer she was on, and if the rifle hadn't been on a strap around her body, it would have gone right over the edge. A second thump shook the trailer, and she realized that this was no accident. Staying as steady as she could, she crawled on her belly over to the side where the thumping was coming from. There were two large hyenas rushing the trailer. They had realized the tool that she was training on their kinsmen, and it looked like they were determined to take her out.
This close, she could smell their fur, see the way froth sprayed from their powerful jaws. Those jaws could snap a springbok's leg in two, she knew, and suddenly, all she could think about were those teeth digging into her flesh.
Stephanie gritted her teeth to stop them from chattering, and then she reached for her rifle. When she was taking aim again, however, they rammed the trailer, nearly shaking her off of it. She couldn't steady herself for a clear shot, not when every time she tried, the entire structure shook underneath her.
She could feel the first tendrils of panic winding up towards her heart and her mind, but then rescue appeared in the form of an enormous tiger and a panther as dark as a midnight shadow. They swarmed the two hyenas as if they had a personal grudge against them, and Stephanie, despite being inured to the violence she had just seen, had to look away as the enemy were dispatched with two enormous snaps.
As she watched, the black panther turned into Marcus. The man was utterly naked and covered with gore, but he did not pay any mind to it as he called to her.
"Are you all right? Can you come down?"
She was, and she could. She slithered down a little more roughly than she had climbed up, but when she stood in front of the two shifter warriors, she could feel herself steady.
"Is that it, is it over?" she asked.
Marcus nodded as Jax simply turned and sprinted away, towards the place where the non-combatants were being kept safe. Stephanie felt her throat close with fear.
"What is it, what's..."
Marcus shook his head.
"The hyenas are dead, we can count on that. Jax has other things on his mind..."